The War of the Worlds
First appearance in print, 1897-1898
The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells is one of the defining works of the alien invasion story and a landmark of early science fiction. Martians land in Surrey and advance toward London, armed with the Heat-Ray and poisonous Black Smoke against which the British military is virtually helpless. Wells reverses the assumptions of imperial Britain, placing humanity in the position of a weaker population confronted by a technologically superior invader that regards it with little more concern than humans show other species.
This set contains the first appearance in print of the novel, which Pearson's Magazine serialized across nine consecutive issues in 1897, spanning Volume III (April to June) and Volume IV (July to December). Here is the complete six-volume run of the magazine, Volumes I through VI, published by C. Arthur Pearson from January 1896 to December 1898, profusely illustrated with black and white plates and in-text engravings. Two further Wells stories, "The Rajah's Treasure" and "In the Abyss," made their first appearances in Volume II.
Hardcover. First edition. Octavo, bound in pictorial boards with a floral onlay in brown, green, and gold. London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd., 1896-1898. Provenance: The Victor Gulotta Collection. #11486.
Boards slightly soiled with wear to the spine ends and some loss to the gilt and gold. A very good set.
This set contains the first appearance in print of the novel, which Pearson's Magazine serialized across nine consecutive issues in 1897, spanning Volume III (April to June) and Volume IV (July to December). Here is the complete six-volume run of the magazine, Volumes I through VI, published by C. Arthur Pearson from January 1896 to December 1898, profusely illustrated with black and white plates and in-text engravings. Two further Wells stories, "The Rajah's Treasure" and "In the Abyss," made their first appearances in Volume II.
Hardcover. First edition. Octavo, bound in pictorial boards with a floral onlay in brown, green, and gold. London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd., 1896-1898. Provenance: The Victor Gulotta Collection. #11486.
Boards slightly soiled with wear to the spine ends and some loss to the gilt and gold. A very good set.
Additional Details
The War of the Worlds (1898) is the fourth of H. G. Wells's scientific romances, following The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man, and the work that established the pattern for countless alien invasion stories to follow. Its unnamed narrator is a writer on philosophical subjects living near Woking in Surrey, and he reconstructs the invasion after the fact, combining his own experiences with accounts gathered from others. The threat is announced in the opening paragraph, where a complacent humanity is watched from Mars by "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" that regard the earth with envious eyes and slowly draw their plans against it.
The invasion begins quietly. A cylinder falls on Horsell Common and draws a curious crowd who take it for a fallen meteorite. When the Martians emerge and a party of men approaches under a white flag, they are burned to ash by the Heat-Ray, an invisible beam of heat directed like a searchlight. Wells allows ordinary Surrey life to continue only a few miles from the landing, with trains running and shops open while the first machines are assembled. By the time the country understands what is happening, the Martians are already beyond stopping. They stride across the landscape in towering fighting-machines, release a suffocating Black Smoke that kills everything that breathes it, and choke the rivers and fields with a fast-spreading red weed carried from their own world. The narrative follows the collapse outward from Surrey to the mass flight from London, one of the earliest depictions in English fiction of a modern population reduced to refugees.
The Martians are, in effect, brains that have outlived most of the functions of the body, feeding by injecting the fresh blood of living creatures directly into their veins. Wells uses them for more than simple horror. Early in the book the narrator asks whether the Martians should be judged harshly at all, reminding the reader that the Tasmanians, "in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years." The Martians do to England what European powers had done elsewhere. Wells reverses the position of imperial Britain and places its people at the mercy of a technologically superior invader that regards them as a lesser species.
Late in the novel, the narrator encounters an artilleryman on Putney Hill who has already imagined what life under permanent Martian rule might become. He predicts that surviving humans will be kept as domesticated stock, bred and fattened for food, while others are made docile and content with their captivity. A small number of determined survivors, he believes, will retreat underground and preserve enough knowledge to challenge the Martians someday. For a time the narrator is impressed by the scheme, but the artilleryman's grand plans quickly prove hollow. He talks of tunneling into the London drains while doing little actual work, and is more interested in food, drink, and cards than preparing for the future he describes. His confidence becomes another response to catastrophe, an elaborate fantasy of control in a world where humans have almost none.
There is ultimately no human victory over the Martians. The narrator wanders through a silent and abandoned London, following the dying wail of the last fighting-machines, and discovers that the invaders have been destroyed without any decisive human action. They are "slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth," the bacteria to which terrestrial life has adapted over ages and against which the Martians have no defense. Humanity survives not because of its armies, technology, or intelligence, but because of a biological accident of its own history. The artilleryman's observation that "it never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants" sums up the imbalance that has defined the invasion from the beginning. Written at the height of British imperial power, the novel imagines that power suddenly reversed, forcing its readers to experience the world from the position of the weaker species.
The invasion begins quietly. A cylinder falls on Horsell Common and draws a curious crowd who take it for a fallen meteorite. When the Martians emerge and a party of men approaches under a white flag, they are burned to ash by the Heat-Ray, an invisible beam of heat directed like a searchlight. Wells allows ordinary Surrey life to continue only a few miles from the landing, with trains running and shops open while the first machines are assembled. By the time the country understands what is happening, the Martians are already beyond stopping. They stride across the landscape in towering fighting-machines, release a suffocating Black Smoke that kills everything that breathes it, and choke the rivers and fields with a fast-spreading red weed carried from their own world. The narrative follows the collapse outward from Surrey to the mass flight from London, one of the earliest depictions in English fiction of a modern population reduced to refugees.
The Martians are, in effect, brains that have outlived most of the functions of the body, feeding by injecting the fresh blood of living creatures directly into their veins. Wells uses them for more than simple horror. Early in the book the narrator asks whether the Martians should be judged harshly at all, reminding the reader that the Tasmanians, "in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years." The Martians do to England what European powers had done elsewhere. Wells reverses the position of imperial Britain and places its people at the mercy of a technologically superior invader that regards them as a lesser species.
Late in the novel, the narrator encounters an artilleryman on Putney Hill who has already imagined what life under permanent Martian rule might become. He predicts that surviving humans will be kept as domesticated stock, bred and fattened for food, while others are made docile and content with their captivity. A small number of determined survivors, he believes, will retreat underground and preserve enough knowledge to challenge the Martians someday. For a time the narrator is impressed by the scheme, but the artilleryman's grand plans quickly prove hollow. He talks of tunneling into the London drains while doing little actual work, and is more interested in food, drink, and cards than preparing for the future he describes. His confidence becomes another response to catastrophe, an elaborate fantasy of control in a world where humans have almost none.
There is ultimately no human victory over the Martians. The narrator wanders through a silent and abandoned London, following the dying wail of the last fighting-machines, and discovers that the invaders have been destroyed without any decisive human action. They are "slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth," the bacteria to which terrestrial life has adapted over ages and against which the Martians have no defense. Humanity survives not because of its armies, technology, or intelligence, but because of a biological accident of its own history. The artilleryman's observation that "it never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants" sums up the imbalance that has defined the invasion from the beginning. Written at the height of British imperial power, the novel imagines that power suddenly reversed, forcing its readers to experience the world from the position of the weaker species.
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